As information sprawls across the wiki, we're in constant need of help and efforts to keep it tame, trimmed, and usable - purging old/broken information and links, creating and updating portal pages for various user groups and topics... I'm sure you can think of more.

If you'd like to help organize knowledge here, please jump in and edit.

Basic cleanup

Getting started

The first, easiest, and largest tasks on the wiki are ones that anyone can do. Some suggestions:

Mark pages that need work

There are several thousand pages on this wiki. Many of them were created in a hurry and need to be cleaned up. There is a page here on the wiki that contains a large list of pages that have been marked {{cleanup}}: Category:Cleanup. There are two tasks that can be done with this:

Go to the Special:Allpages page, and look for pages that need {{cleanup}} added to them.

When you find a wiki page that needs cleanup, click the 'Edit' tab and add the {{cleanup}} in the top of the edit box.

Mark obsolete pages

The wiki has thousands of older pages; you can tell them by dates from before 2007; if you see something that looks like a duplicate or older discussion of a highly-linked page, it may be one of them.

There are special templates that flag such pages more specifically than just "cleanup".
If two pages seem to cover the same ground, figure out the worse page — the one that's less useful, has less 'What links here', hasn't been significantly updated recently according to its [History] tab, and has the less obvious title. Mark it either

{{merge|Better page}}

or

{{obsolete|link=[[Better page]]}}

Fix pages that need work

It's useful to readers to indicate pages that need work or aren't relevant, but it's far far better to improve or eliminate them.

Glossary could use some thoughtful expansion. Jargon serves a useful purpose as shorthand for technical discussions, but it also poses a substantial barrier-to-entry for new contributors. A more extensive Glossary would be very helpful in allowing outsiders to become insiders.

Put semantics on all activities

As of 2008-12-10 running a special query shows the following activities use {{OBX xobundle}} and thus probably have a .xo file, yet don't have the property (thus aren't using {{Activity page}} or are using it badly:

the activity pages that claim to be in the G1G1 activity group in Form:Activity and [[Template:Activity page] exactly match the activities listed in Activities/G1G1/8.2. (Some day one might be generated from the other.)

Pages desperately needing help

February 2008 barnraising

- update Table of Contents and other metapages
- organize a "wiki getting started" section similar to that for the XO; at least in outline
-- longer-term : provide a community site map of contributors and projects

2) Categorize outdated pages, archive long pages

- "needs update" "deprecated" and "archive", "to be avoided"

3) Collections of 'User information' boxes and badges for self-identification of interests and areas where they want to help.

Wiki on-going restructure

You can help with cleanup activities by tagging pages for:

Deletion as a consequence of a {{delete}} tag. Caveats apply meaning that it could be deleted - not necessarily that it will be deleted. A sub-category for deletion is specific for #REDIRECT pages tagged with {{deletere}}

Merging as a consequence of {{merge}} (seeing all those bits-of-pages, siblings could be found to merge with, or other central pages.)

Clean-up as their current state is sub-standard in some way and needs work.

If you can't find a page, check the:

Move log - many pages have been moved leaving redirects (that could've been deleted later)

Is a mixed bag, as it includes mispelled links (ie: upper/lower case) together with close-but-not-quite pre-existing pages, and truly wanted pages. Noise here is rather high due to users never having edited their page and many non-existant Talk pages referenced via templates.

soon I'll add a bit about the special categories, but in the meantime refer to the ones mentioned above in the ongoing process.

Ongoing projects, things to note

Categorization & OLPC boxes

For examples of OLPC box templates in use, see e.g. User:Xavi/Test
The liberty the wiki provides in creating pages is wonderful, albeit a bit anarchist; particularly if pages are orphaned or if they are simple dead-ends. Even if they are isolated, categories can help. Finally, templates are a way to systematically format data, and possibly categorize pages in some structured way.

Useful templates should be simple to build and to use. As {{Status box}} and {{Educator}} have somewhat proven, their evolution and ability to incorporte both broad and specific details that are relevant and meaningful hasn't been that easy. My conclusion is that they will systematically fail until we have a comprehensive and structured understanding of too many things that are currently highly volatile.

The solution proposed is a set of atomic templates and a way to group them in a visual way. Needless to say that this is not intended to be just a 'visual effect'; the real purpose is to categorize pages so that they can be retrieved. Although the practice is not much different than normal categorization (ie: making sure the appropriate [[Category:whatever]] appears in the pages) it does provide a more consistent (and easier) way to:

Provide not only a category, but also some contextual information about it's belonging there

If in the future we want to 'split' the categorizations, modifying the appropriate OBX templates will result in them being sub-classified based on just the template itself, or maybe some parameter required by it.

Not everything will be nice and comfy with them olpc boxes but hopefully they will provide the incentive to create simple templates that address a specific need, for example providing links and categorizations in a visually consistent manner so that the readers and users of the wiki can profit from them.

Also, they are supposed to be nice and cool looking :)

Please take a look at the proposed / possible boxes being thought so that the initial set of useful boxes can be built and used. --Xavi 21:00, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

FAQ subpage structure

I'm trying to beat the FAQ back into some usable shape. Some short instructions are at Answering questions - the associated talk page is the place to talk about how this is working. Homunq 14:10, 30 January 2008 (EST)